Safety II – What it is…and Why we Need it!

In my last Safety newsletter, I wrote about the need to significantly improve our safety performance.

safety excellence in business leadershipI feel we are not moving fast enough to get to higher levels of performance. Way too many people are getting hurt and killed. Safety is a part of all we are doing and the whole system needs to be making improvements.

A big step was taken towards this goal in a Safety II in Practice Workshop in Saint Petersburg, Florida, on February 24-27, 2019. This excellent gathering was organized and brought together by Tom McDaniel, a widely experienced, practical safety leader. One speaker was Eric Hollnagel who has written several books about Safety II. He summarizes Safety II as “the ability to succeed under varying conditions, so that the number of intended and acceptable outcomes is as high as possible. The Safety II perspective looks at how work goes well and tries to understand how that happens in order to ensure that it will happen again.” The shift from Safety I, where we look at what went wrong, to Safety II where we look at what is going right and learn from it is critical for our work to attain higher levels of performance.

Tom McDaniel spoke of our obligation to present the closest interpretation of the truth in our organizations enabling the people to be given enough information to make the best possible decisions. We need to engage the people to help to improve our total performance including safety and reducing the number of incidents and injuries. We need to understand and build upon the things that people are doing right. He shared many practical examples to illustrate this.

Ron Gantt spoke about the need to widen our gaze to see the complex interactions of everyday work so we can see opportunities for improvement and facilitation rather only violations. He talked about the importance of going into our organizations, being with the people and seeing how they really do their work and the challenges they face every day as they get the jobs done. It is important to close the gap between work-as-imagined and work-as-done.

Our Safety I habits are strong and it is not easy to move into a Safety II approach and sustain it. Safety I and Safety II are not in opposition to each other. Rather we need to take the best of the basic rules, procedures and skills of Safety I, and build the positive approach of Safety II into our way of working with the people at all levels in the organization so that everyone can be the best they can be.

Richard N. Knowles speaking at the safety conferenceI was given the opportunity to talk about my work on Partner-Centered Leadership and shared information about the Process Enneagram, which is such a powerful tool to help people to come together to solve their complex problems. Partner-Centered Leadership is focused on sharing information, building trust and interdependence, helping everyone see the importance of their work for the success of the whole enterprise and moving into a better future. Everyone at the workshop was seeking ways to actually move into Safety II and make it happen so there was a lot of interest in this work.

Tom McDaniel was gracious in commenting:

Dick Knowles has the most effective process for understanding and measuring leadership and its advancement. His knowledge on this subject is outstanding. He brings clarity to what many are already doing in an ad hoc method but by seeing this relationship distinction, it can only help you and your organization move further along. I know he has written a couple of books on this. He has helped many organizations succeed.

This Workshop was an exciting step into a brighter future for the people in our organizations. Many thanks to Tom McDaniel for having organized this workshop and bringing everyone together to share and learn.

Where are the leaders?

…My Beliefs on Leadership

leaders take a stand on their solid beliefs and valuesLeaders are people who have a vision of what is possible, are concerned and care enough to make a difference, have the courage and commitment to do the work, and truly engage with people to learn, grow and to achieve their results. These are people who regularly go into their organizations, walk around, have the important conversations about getting better, building a respectful workplace, listening carefully, building trust and interdependence, and helping the people to be the best they can be. They create environments where it is safe to openly talk together, ask questions, share information, think out-loud and build a better future.

Leaders take a stand on their solid beliefs and values, then ask the people to hold them accountable to live up to their stand. When I was the plant manager of a large chemical plant, my stand was, “I don’t have a right to make my living in a place where it is okay for you to get hurt. We also need to make a living so let’s work together to accomplish all this. Please help me to live up to this standard.

As leaders take a stand, ask for help and use conversational processes like these, the organizations will transform themselves and build long-lasting capability to learn, grow and prosper. I walked the plant for 5 hours a day, for 5 years, listening, talking, learning, building trust and openness. In doing this, my work got a lot easier and more effective. For example, in working this way, our injury rates dropped by about 98% to a Total Recordable Injury Rate (TRI) of about 0.3 and sustained this for 17 years. Productivity rose about 45%, emissions dripped about 87% and earnings rose about 300%.

This way of leading is proven, sustainable and achievable.

This is Partner-Centered Leadership. Our organizations desperately need this kind of Leadership. (Scroll down for more on this!)

But where are the Leaders?

leaders are people who have a vision of what is possibleLots of managers talk about the need for organizations to change and improve. But as I talk with people, go to conferences and read the safety literature, I hardly ever encounter anyone leading this way. So many managers do not know what it means to lead.

  • Many have been promoted into positions of responsibility without having practical experience so they do not know what actually happens and how things work.
  • Many are deeply trained in the business economics, but have little understanding of how to work with or value people.
  • Most business schools do not teach a safety course so these graduates do not know what it takes to build a safe, sustainable organization.
  • Some managers are afraid to go into their organizations to talk with the people. They lack the courage to genuinely engage people.
  • Many managers are enamored with numbers, big data and statistics thinking that these are the main source of knowledge; they are not.
  • Many managers think that they know best and have little value for the knowledge of the working people so they drive a top-down management approach and wonder why morale is so low and things do not change.
  • Many managers like the safety and comfort of their offices seeming to hide from the people in their organizations.
  • Many managers think that more rules and procedures are the way to improve the safety performance, but it takes the people to make the real changes.
  • Many managers do not understand or appreciate the difference between work as imagined and work as done.
  • Many managers do not seem to be interested in learning something new.
  • Many managers are very uncomfortable with the ambiguity in our complex organizations.
  • Too many managers are comfortable with the status quo; we have always done it this way.
  • Almost 50% of the bullying in organizations is from people in supervisory and management positions so they are unable to build trust and openness.

I mentioned earlier that our TRI stayed at about 0.3 for 17 years, with 12 of them after I was reassigned to another plant. During that 12-year period, there were 5 different managers with behaviors like those listed above and lost contact with the people. The standards fell apart and then a man was accidently killed in a situation that was entirely preventable.

Contact us soon (716-622-6467) to discover how you can achieve Partner-Centered Leadership and have your organization flourish in 2019!

“Workplace Fatalities” by Todd Conklin (2017)

Safety Leadership ProcessTodd Conklin works with companies to help them recover and begin to heal after they have experienced a fatality in their workforce. He has come up with a different, creative way to look why the number of fatalities at work has remained at about 4,700 people a year for a number of years. Our programs of focusing on accident prevention have significantly reduced the total number of recordable injuries, but they have not had much impact on reducing the number of fatalities.

In our work, we normally plan to do the job well and prevent an injury or incident. We do training on how to do the particular piece of work. But, for most of our work, we hardly do anything to look at what can kill a person, consider the things that will prevent the fatality, and discuss the ways a person can recover from the situation when it happens. In work, like a confined space entry, which we all know can be deadly, we do everything well most of the time. But in most other tasks, the training is less demanding and the things that can kill someone are often over-looked.

Here are three questions he suggests that we talk together about before doing a job:

  1. What hazards do you encounter that have the potential to seriously injure or kill you?
  2. When your work goes bad what keeps you from getting injured or killed?
  3. Are these enough?

It will take some time to discuss these fully, so please create the space and the trust in the workday so these discussions can take place.

The people actually doing the work are usually in the best position to have the intimate knowledge required to go deep enough.

Todd’s book, Workplace Fatalities: Failure to Predict: A New Safety Discussion on Fatality and Serious Event Reduction, is available from Amazon.

Sound the Alarm!

alarming safety trendsI just saw an announcement that the Liberty Mutual Research Institute for Safety was closing after 59 years, to reduce costs. The ISO 45001 Standard is in the final stages and is aimed at improving safety around the world. Yet some people are reacting that it will not make a difference because of management indifference or cost restraints.

Workplace violence seems to be on the rise with 417 homicides and 354 shootings in the US in 2015. In spite of this, only 28% of the American Society of Training and Development members offer safety training programs in collaboration with law enforcement.

As we study and look at what is happening, we see a critical lack of managers and supervisors in their understanding of what leadership is all about and how important each of their roles is to the success of the organization. The guidance about leadership that fills so many books are not making much impact because it does not provide suggestions as to what leaders need to do.

Leadership is about action, about taking the initiative to work together, to partner, with the people to make their workplaces safer and better.


We Need Better Leadership!

leadership is needed for safetyMany of you who have been reading this newsletter know that our emphasis is on Partner Centered Leadership. We emphasize the importance of supervisors and managers getting into their workplaces each day and talking with the people. Talking with the people is a key to breaking through to safety excellence. Talking about the risks they face each day, how they are managing them, how their kids are doing, how the safety is doing, how the business is doing, asking them what they see as to ways to improve their own work, asking about problems they are dealing with, etc. Doing this with respect and really listening are vitally important.

This was the focus of my ASSE talk in Denver. There is a solid, scientifically based reason for engaging in Partner Centered Leadership. The Self-Organizing Criticality theory shows the importance of making small, focused changes like talking with the people. Each conversation builds the potential energy of the organization and at some point people begin to do things more safely, helping each other, taking the lead when they see a problem and begin the process to correct it. As the organization begins to work together more safely, share information and help each other, safety improves. The organization learns to live near the critical point where changes occur and their creative energy builds.

The Process Enneagram©, which I have spoken about in these newsletters and written books about, is the tool to us to develop the focused conversation that lift the organization towards excellence in safety. Combining the ideas about change coming out of the Self-Organizing Criticality work with the Process Enneagram© tool for developing focused, disciplined conversations enables the organization to achieve excellence in their safety performance and have more people going home safely.

Partner Centered Leadership is also the way for organizations to build more kind, considerate, helping, effective workplaces where everyone is looking out for each other. This is a key piece of work in reducing workplace violence. When there is an acceptance of bullying and harassment in the workplace, the field is fertile for violence. Partner Centered Leadership is the pathway to excellence. It is time to move forward. Call us at 716-622-6467 to get on board the important leadership train for safety.

Workplace Violence Prevention

This is another dimension of our workplace safety challenges. Our focus here is to prevent deliberate harm to one another. Terrible tragedies are created when someone brings a gun into one’s workplace and starts shooting. But our concern here goes more broadly than these incidents. Frustrated, angry people can do mean things to each other by sexually harassing, bullying, or repeatedly picking on those who are seen as weak or at a disadvantage. OSHA reports that about 2,000,000 cases like this are reported each year. How many more go unreported?

I have read surveys that indicate that up to 80% of the people in our organizations are frustrated and unhappy. In these sorts of hostile environments, bad feelings can fester and grow to the point where they blow up and people get hurt in one way or another. It doesn’t have to be that way!

A step towards preventing workplace violence is to use the Partner-Centered Leadership (Engagement) Process. As we learn to work together, talk together, listen to each other, and build trust and interdependence, we create an environment that is more supportive, caring and effective. (It doesn’t take long to uncover the obvious: rudeness, disrespect and unprofessionalism lead to incivility and discord, which in turn, leads to bullying and harassment, which in turn, can accelerate to Workplace Violence – physical or mental.)

The steps I suggested in the first part of this newsletter are good ones to use to help to make our workplaces more kind, supportive and healthy. We can all do this if we want to do it! Increasing our levels of positive engagement with all our people is the key to healthy workplaces. The Partner-Centered Leadership Process is the way.

the three types of employees

Spring Cleaning

spring cleaningAs the snow begins to melt and the spring winds arrive, it is time for cleaning up the place. Mud season is upon us as the snow melts. All sorts of curious things emerge from the melting piles of snow; stuff that was covered up and lost. (Just imagine: Years ago the settlers kept their animals sheltered next to their houses or barns attached to their houses so that they could care for them when the winter cold set in. They really had to do the spring-cleaning!)

I would like to consider a special kind of spring-cleaning. What are the old cobwebs, dusty corners and dated ideas we have tucked away in our heads? Are these holding us back – preventing our ability to achieve safety excellence? Erik Hollnagel talks about the need to shift our thinking from the traditional approach (Safety-I) to a more open, inclusive, more effective approach he calls Safety-II. (Erik Hollnagel, 2014. Safety-I and Safety-II).

Let’s open the windows and let the light in with our Partner-Centered Safety Leadership processes that enable all of us to move towards safety excellence.

Here are some simple things we can do to make the shift towards a Safety-II environment:

  • As leaders, managers and supervisors let’s talk together to develop a clear, consistent safety vision and message.
  • We can go into our workplaces, talk with the people, open our minds, listen, and learn together to develop the trust and the best safety rules and procedures so everyone goes home to their families free of physical and mental injuries.
  • We can continually grow and learn together.
  • We can identify those areas where we need to do more training or develop new procedures.
  • We can find new ways to connect safety and security with having personal meaning for everyone.
  • We can bring in specialists to help us when necessary.
  • All sorts of options for improvement open up to us as we shift our thinking and brush away the cobwebs.

As we learn and grow together, trust and interdependence build, everyone begins to open up, taking the initiative to improve things. As we work together with the Partner-Centered Safety Leadership process, we can all get better and that is fun!

 

Here’s What “Business Betterment” Looks Like…

As I talk with Leaders, I often hear that things are so entrenched they cannot even conceive that this type of “betterment” can happen for them.

We know that it can, and we prove it over and over again, as we work with leaders, their teams, and their businesses.

CULTURE: We help to knock down the walls that have grown up between people and groups so that the arguments and fighting stop and they learn to value and help each other. We help to drill holes in the silos of production, HR, maintenance and finance so that people can talk to each other to get the information they need to do their jobs. We help to remove the barriers that are restricting the up and down flow of critical information, improving its accuracy, so the organization can function more easily. We help to remove the barriers between the people writing rules and procedures (the work- as-imagined) and those doing the front-line work (the work-as-done). We help people to see that most of the injuries and incidents are the result of patterns and processes that need improvement and shift away from a culture of blame and criticism.

SAFETY: I believe that we do not have a right to make our living in a place where it is okay to hurt people. When we make this our top belief, many fewer people get hurt and our economic performance is a lot better as well. As we learn to work this way the barriers and roadblocks melt away and new channels and connections emerge.

LOSS: Avoiding the losses and waste means that our businesses are more competitive and healthy. How much do you suppose an OSHA Lost Time Injury costs the business?

  • The pain and suffering is miserable.
  • There is the direct cost of the doctors, hospitals, medications, etc.
  • We loose time:
    • having to investigate the injury and incident.,
    • writing reports,
    • having an OSHA investigation,
    • perhaps the cost of challenging OSHA’s findings,
    • legal costs for the company attorneys,
    • preparing for a potential law suit,
    • the cost of lost production time,
    • the cost of bringing someone and train them to replace the injured person,
    • the cost of lost sales,
    • the cost of bad publicity,
    • the cost of lower morale among the people,
    • and so on.

BOTTOM LINE: When the safety gets right, everything else gets right as well. In this more positive culture, not only does the waste of injuries and incidents go away, people shift the way that they chose to work together resulting in other improvements like:

  • fewer arguments,
  • fewer grievances,
  • better meetings,
  • fewer meetings,
  • more suggestions for improving our systems and processes,
  • people taking the lead in helping to fix something that is not right,
  • new ideas for better customer service emerge,
  • lean manufacturing works better,
  • the quality of products and services get better,
  • absenteeism drops, and
  • people can work together to build a better future.

When the safety performance and culture get better, the organization thrives.

These are things that each organization can work on right now. In Partner-Centered Leadership, Richard N. Knowles & Associates can help organizations to achieve all these things. This does not require investment.

  • Get clear on your thinking and purpose.
  • Go into your organization talking with and listening to the people.
  • Help them to build on their ideas.
  • Let them know how important they are to the success of the business.
  • Do this with respect and honesty.

Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence – only in constant improvement and constant change.
~ Tom Peters

Releasing the Forces for Excellence

safety excellenceAs this year comes to an end, we will be looking at our overall performance to see how we did and to plan for 2017. We will usually look at our injury statistics like the total recordable injury rate and try to determine how we performed. Often quite independently, others will look at other performance indicators to see how they came out. We act as if these are independent of each other, but in our organizations everything is connected so all aspects of performance influence each other. Everything happens through the people. All the parts are interconnected. Excellence in safety performance is strongly related to our total performance because it all works through the will of the people.

We traditionally try to apply safety and other metrics to our organizations in a machine-like fashion. We see that something needs to improve so we push harder as if we are pushing a wagon up hill. Too many regulators and managers sit in their offices trying to imagine what needs to be done and write a new procedure or rule so that things will be better. Then they issue edicts pushing everyone harder. However, the work as imagined is never the same as the work as done. Why do managers think that sitting, bound to their office chairs, that they know everything? How can they? Then at the end of 2017 we will do this all over again trying to understand why things did not get better. Around and around we go!

We break this vicious cycle by opening up ourselves to a different way of thinking, seeing and being.

safety managementWork-as-imagined and work-as-done are ideas developed by Erik Hollnagel in his book, Safety-I and Safety-II (2014. Ashgate Publishing Ltd., UK). Safety I is our traditional top-down management approach to safety management where rules and procedures are issued by those far from the actual work. This is like the approach discussed in the proceeding paragraph. I think that a lot of people are trying to do good safety work from the Safety I perspective, but the results are not improving fast enough.

For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) recently reported that the rate for nonfatal injuries and illnesses per 100 people dropped to 3.0 in 2015 from 3.2 in 2014 and 3.3 in 2013. That is a 10% drop over three years. That is way too slow! In 2015 2,900,000 injuries were reported. That is WAY TOO MANY people getting hurt. In an earlier paper the BLS reported that the number of fatalities has hovered around 4,700 people a year for the last 5 years. This is WAY TOO MANY!

This is not just a US problem. For example, Worksafe, New Zealand recently reported that the health and safety laws have had little effect on reducing fatalities further.

While driving safety from the top has had benefits historically, the effort is having less and less impact. But when we change our approach to working with the people to co-create our future, things change for the better quite quickly. This is true! It’s proven!

In the work of Richard N. Knowles and Associates, we approach the organization as if it is a living organism. Time after time coming out of our Safety Excellence Workshops, the performance improves quickly. When we engage with the people this way and help them to co-create their safety future, building on the positive strengths of the people, safety and all other aspects of their work get better quickly. For example, when I was the Plant Manager at the DuPont Belle Plant in West Virginia we worked this way, and our injury rates dropped by over 95% and earnings rose 300% in just three years. This is similar to Hollnagel’s Safety II approach.

Whenever we, at Richard N. Knowles Associates, work in organizations the safety and total performance improves quickly. Everything happens through the force of the will of the people. We release this force helping the people to co-create their shared future. Then we show them how to sustain their work for the years ahead. All dimensions of the business improve; costs are lower, productivity is higher, morale is better and far more people are working safely.

Call us at 716-622-6467 so you can release the positive, creative forces in your organizations quickly!

Working with Multi-Generations in our Workplaces – Safely!

Historical context:
workerConsider the Golden Gate Suspension Bridge (San Francisco) built between 1933 and 1937, an architectural marvel, thought to be impossible because in order to bridge that 6,700 ft. strait, in the middle of the bay channel, against strong tides, fierce winds, and thick fog, meant overcoming almost impossible odds. But it was built, with a grand opening in May of 1937, deemed, at the time of its completion, to be the tallest suspension bridge in the world as well as the longest. A man named Joseph Strauss engineered many new ideas, including developing safety devices such as movable netting, which saved 19 lives; though in all, there were 11 men lost during this construction. Thousands of men – workers of varying ages and from varied ethnic groups – came together to complete this project. (They had to listen and learn to be successful together.)

high-scalersConsider the feat of building the monumental Hoover Dam (1931-1936) – a miracle of technology and engineering. No dam project of this scale had ever been attempted before. There were 21,000 people working at that site with approximately 100 industrial deaths. The walls for this structure – that would uphold the weight of the dam – required workers called “high-scalers” who excavated the cliffs, dangling on ropes from the rim of the canyon. Can you even fathom this?

niagara-power-projectConsider the great Niagara Power Project (1957-1961). During construction, over 12 million cubic yards of rock were excavated. A total of 20 workers died. When it opened in 1961, it was the Western world’s largest hydropower facility. Many people, including from the “greatest generation” and the “traditionalist generation,” worked together on this project. It was a 24/7, multi-year project.

Note that the Niagara Power Project, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Hoover Dam construction (detailed above) all occurred before OSHA was in existence – the protections were sparse so people (young and old) had to especially look out for each other! Each of these great projects, nonetheless, took lives – workers that did not come home to their loved ones.

Today’s multigenerational Workplace – with Greater Safety Emphasis and Engagement

Fast forward to today…to your workplace…a different time and place…where people of multi-generations also come together for a purpose – to complete the work of your respective business (safely). Managing multi-generational workforces is an art in itself.

  • Young workers want to contribute and make a quick impact, valuing inclusion
  • The middle generation needs to believe in the mission – it has to make sense – they have to see the “why” of it
  • The older employees don’t like ambivalence; they’re looking for clarity, straight-forwardness, and no wishy-washy explanations

Does that make success (together) impossible? Absolutely not. The common denominator is that all people, regardless of their labeled generation, want to be accepted for who they are, to have their contribution valued, and to feel a part of the team/business endeavor. All want to go home from work safe. The need for their brother’s/sister’s keeper remains paramount.

In today’s workplaces, we often have a co-worker population that can represent age ranges of forty-plus years. With that range comes a host of different experiences, expectations and perspectives, and technology prowess. (All good; all offer ways to learn from each other.)

Everyone in the workplace came to there because of the employment opportunity – the opportunity to make a living – in order to provide for themselves and their families. (That’s a collective no-brainer…and the place to start in safety-mindedness – so we can all keep earning a living with all our parts, hands, toes, eyes, ears, etc. all in-tact, every day, regardless of what generation we touch.)

Granted, there are some differences in how teamwork is viewed, loyalty to the job and dealing with change, work-life balance, diversity, rewards and recognition, decision-making, personal growth and development – yet all of these differences are surmountable. Consider too, that all of these differences pale in comparison to the generations that went before, who demonstrated that when working together, toward a clear purpose, were able to complete the type of monumental projects described earlier in this article. To do what they did, required extraordinary teamwork.

I’m reminded of the (illustrative) story of four people going gulf fishing in a boat – a Traditionalist, a Boomer, an X-er, and a Millennial. All of a sudden the boat’s captain fell over dead with a heart attack and, in that process, did something destructive to the boat’s motor key mechanism as he fell over, as well as hitting the radio – breaking its channel mechanism. The boat stalled – dead in the water. Fully adrift.

So the combination of four people had to figure out how they’d get back to shore. Each of them devised a workable plan and got to work. The Traditionalist quickly determined what he could salvage from the boat to make more workable oars for paddling back to the shoreline and readied safety flares for expected overhead helicopters or airplanes; he also knew, instinctively, their directional status, fully understanding the sun’s position in the sky.

The Boomer hunted for and found the boat’s engine manual and was troubleshooting the starting mechanism, and how to bypass it – to restart the engine – plus was troubleshooting the boat’s radio, etc.

The X-er immediately used his phone’s GPS coordinates and was preparing to call in to the Coast Guard for help. The Millennial quickly text messaged an SOS to the Coast Guard with emphasis for HELP!

We often resort to solving problems with the technology to which we are most accustomed. In this illustration, each method had value. Each had potential to solve the problem and return the group to shore! Each person, regardless of his/her generational label, has something important to offer – a way of thinking about things. We each have ideas to offer for solving problems in our workplace; we are each other’s brother/sister in the workplace. We are all in the same boat!

We all can learn from each other, especially in safety. We all can listen to each other. History teaches good lessons. We all can share our concerns, our expectations, our perspectives, our technologies…for the betterment of the success of whatever it is that we came together to do (together).

We, at R.N. Knowles & Associates, work with leaders, teams, organizations, and businesses, helping them to solve their complex problems (together). We know that complex situations require new ways of thinking and being. We also are keen on the use of the Process Enneagram© because it is the proven “tool of complexity” that helps leaders and their teams resolve their complex issues (together and quickly). It allows for extensive input, ideas, perspectives, realities, understanding, and acceptance of various ideas, sharing and learning…so that we bridge perception differences and viewpoint gaps around any complex issue that you are facing. When we learn from our individual talents and work as a team, there is no limit to our potential achievements – including our collective safety!

Call us at 716-622-6467and we’ll show you how it can work for your organization, too.

Breaking the Pattern – Allowing the New to Emerge…via The Partner-Centered Safety Leadership Workshop

goldfishIn many of our newsletters, I have talked about helping organizations co-create their safety future using the Process Enneagram© complexity tool in our Partner-Centered Safety Leadership Workshops. This is a powerful tool to help bring the people together around their safety challenges – breaking the old patterns, and co-creating a better, safer future (together).

Here is a brief description about how our Partner-Centered Safety Leadership Workshop takes place:

In a recent workshop, a cross-section of the people, including their manager, came together for a day. There were about 19 people present. We began with the question, “How do we improve our safety performance?” With this as our central focus, we engaged the people with the Process Enneagram©. Everyone participated in developing their living, strategic safety plan over the next four hours in an interactive dialogue in which everyone participated, including delving into the issues and behavioral patterns that keep recurring.

Together, the group determined what new commitments needed to be made (by all of the team) in order to get where they wanted to be, together – to achieve the best results for a safe workplace.

We then asked the people to identify what the top four things were that they needed to immediately work on and develop a plan of action. Then, they self-organized into four teams of about equal size to work on their respective topic. After about two hours, each team reported out to the entire workshop group, sharing their ideas and plans to improve safety and to solve their problem. They identified their leader, the team members, their plan of action and when they would be meeting again to do their work.

After the workshop, the participants shared what had happened with all the others in the organization who had not attended, asking for ideas for improvement.

In order to sustain this work, their manager needed to talk with all of them frequently about the progress of their teams. The manager supported each team with the resources and contacts they needed to do their work. About once a month, all the teams came together and reviewed their progress with each of the other teams and the manager. Open communications with the rest of the organization kept everyone informed of the progress.

The manager talked with everyone in the organization about their Safety Strategic Plan, sharing information abundantly, listening carefully, and building credibility. He/she also spent time with each team to understand their work. The manager often helped the teams to contact others in the organization or suppliers so they could make progress. The manager created the environment of open communications and trust to make all this happen and to sustain the work.

When Claire and I returned to this organization after about four months, each team met with us to discuss their progress, frustrations and successes. Every team had made progress and everyone was talking about how to help the organization improve. Several teams had completed their initial project and had begun to work on the next piece of work to help the organization get stronger and safer. Almost everyone in the organization was talking about ways to help to improve the organization’s safety performance. Clearly, the organization had markedly improved, moving forward to a better, safer workplace for everyone. And they co-created that future (together).

Discover how your organization can see safety turnarounds quickly. For more information, contact us at 716-622-6467.

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